


mortis causa

by mazzo



Category: Naruto
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, but the character isn't like... even a real character they're just someone mentioned, oh also mentions of a character death, oh.... i'm so bad at this..., they are getting to know each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 16:03:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10767669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazzo/pseuds/mazzo
Summary: For the first time in his life, he could see clearly the cranny, wrenched perfect to his size, meant for him.





	mortis causa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ravebot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravebot/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Turn Toward the Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9635126) by [ravebot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravebot/pseuds/ravebot). 



> this is just a lil somethin somethin for my good buddy rave! as like a uhhh i guess prelude or something of his fic "turned toward the moon," so read that first! it'll probably make a lil more sense. or don't! live how you want! the choice is yours! you have the power to decide!

If you pick up a used, corn-yellow paperback from the corner-of-Digby-and-Southern bookstore and decide to purchase it for $3.49 after running your fingers across the title ( _The Great Guide to Foster Parenting_ , that is), you may learn an abundance of things that grade school never told you about having a foster child; one — on the first page — being that no one says _foster child_. It’s outdated. We say _child in care_ , now, thank you very much.

But perhaps most salient is a section of _The Great Guide_ that Gaara has dog-eared which highlights the variety of exceptional attention to give to a child coming into your home from their parent’s funeral. He’s tired. It is an overwhelming read, considering how often Gaara runs his fingers across the words; words that are to be describing Shinki — his new miniature roommate — turned words that embarrass Gaara’s own gray bones.

It’s already the end of their first week living together, but it feels like no progress has been made in helping Shinki settle into his brand new next to normal. There have been times where, up under the lamplight and on top of the feathers, Gaara — per the instruction of their case-manager-appointed child counselor — has attempted to have conversations about what’s really happening, here.

The last time they tried this, Shinki bit Gaara’s finger so hard he had to rush to get stitches, and Gaara only felt farther and further away.

Now it’s the weekend, which means Gaara will have to return from his sudden and short paternal leave back to the office that counts his sheep in just a couple turns of the moon. Though, it’s as if he’s been at work this whole time _anyways_. Even now, Gaara is shoving a buttered peanut butter and raisin toast into his mouth over top report-to-court forms and a mountain of books and books and _more books_ suggested to him by the counselors, the social workers, the court.

Shinki burps. He is laid out on his — _their_ — living room rug, honeycrisp-red cheeks wished to sleep in tune with the somnolent Saturday morning’s scheme. Their second-story window is pushed open slightly enough to hear the birds chatter and for the sun to transpierce the ponderous air. Gaara, between bushed sighs, considers tossing a blanket into the dryer for the youngster; who is, after all, prettified in nil but a vanilla-yogurt-stained Monsters Inc. t-shirt and two adhesive bandages to the elbow.

Before he gets the chance to fetch a blanket, however, Shinki rumbles awake and stretches his toes and gives way to a big yawn. Gaara waits and watches from the couch, staying still, and only interferes when Shinki nearly rolls over right into the coffee table to reach and stick his foot between the two. Shinki sits up, looks at the foot, looks at the table.

“Shinki —“ Gaara starts.

“No!” Shinki breaks in, frown settled and eyes serious.

And there is just something very _serious_ looking about this boy, only six years old. He wears a morose scowl that burns like dissent and always keeps his body held in a halfway-there southpaw stance. There are shallow and keen divots on his forehead from frowning so damn often, which strikes against the mellow pillows under his eyes from the long week they have both been enduring.

(Though, this is not to mention the features of Shinki’s that make him look less serious and have him look more piteous: above his sun-chapped lip, a stout scar that runs up from the mouth to his left nostril, still red and repairing; below his eyebrow, the remains of a month-old swelling to his sullen right eye; behind his ear, a memory.)

Shinki dashes up to his feet, grabs a stuffed toy sticking out from underneath the couch Gaara is sat on, and scurries to the first bedroom down the hall of the apartment.

Gaara flinches when he slams the door shut.

* * *

It’s not that Gaara doesn’t like children. He’s mostly wishing he knew how to interact with them.  And _really_ mostly, he’s wishing he knew more about how to interact with anyone at all.

Is it normal to be like this? No, probably not, but Gaara can tell you that _he_ is like this, and it makes him sick. Sometimes (all the time) he considers retraining his naturality, as it is most apparent to Gaara that the reasoning behind his not being able to connect to anyone at all is simply everything about him. Guilt and shame settle in the grotto of his chest when he thinks too much about this, so he doesn’t.

But for now, in the midst of a heated negotiation — an hour at the park in exchange for eating at least half of the afternoon meal — Gaara wishes he could _at least_ talk with Shinki.

“No,” Shinki tells Gaara easily, turning his face away from the dish that was set in front of him on the dining room table. It’s lunchtime, and at this point, Gaara cannot figure out if Shinki is a picky eater, if his cooking is absolute shit, or if there is just something about how he is presenting it that is extremely unbecoming to a child — and Gaara should know; he’d spent the afternoon prior reading about how you need to tactically diversify a child’s meal in a way that is both pleasing for them to look at and stimulating for them to eat.

“Do you not like rice?” Gaara asks the boy. And Shinki shakes his head, but Gaara is finding out that that can mean “No, I don’t like rice,” or, “No, you’re wrong; I _do_ like rice.” Or even possibly (and most popularly), “I don’t like you or your question.”

Because, really, Shinki doesn’t say anything _but_ “no.”

And Gaara understands having to decide which words are safe in your mouth. It must be hard, he knows, for Shinki to dig his hands into this mess and come out with hot gold running down his arms.

Gaara was far from prepared for this, and still is. Having children wasn’t a part of his game plan, but neither was living past 18, so why _not_ just promise a random client of yours that you will gladly raise her child in case she kicks the bucket during her life-saving surgery at the voluptuous age of 27? Since the moment the words skipped off of Gaara’s tongue, he’s been terrified. The lonely life was his because it was _safe_. His footprints still trail behind him covered in charcoal colored remains of ashes from the last time someone burned him, and he forgot the way back, anyways.

But there was just something about the moment: a mother so mutilated that her beloved child could not rest his eyes on her, paired with the funk of a dubious friend cloaked in black collecting her treasure under hospital lights. It’s all Gaara can do to explain how, for the first time in his life, he could see clearly the cranny, wrenched perfect to his size, meant for him.

Gaara never met his own mother (she had received a summons to pass along to somewhere so composed and subdued that no one can be angry with her for following). He doesn’t stand guard to thrice-weekly nightmares of coming home to empty stained carpet grains, but he is comfortable with the ache of wanting to rush home and meet his blistered palms with something warm. This was enough for Gaara to know he didn’t want Shinki getting left behind.

“Shinki,” Gaara tries once more, coming to a rest on his knees besides Shinki’s booster-seated dining chair and trying to remember all the wrong things he shouldn’t say, bury them under his tongue carefully. “Maybe we can try —”

“No.”

“— something new?” He looks at Shinki carefully and _oh_ , Gaara remembers not wanting to eat meals prepared just for him. Gaara remembers not wanting to eat a meal that shouldn’t have been — he should have been eating at the dinner table with his sister and with his brother, and with his mother.

“No.”

Shinki should be eating dinner with his mother. The clutch of his small fists in his lap scream, _I want to go home_.

“Okay.” Gaara rises back up to his feet. Now seems like the time to reach out and hold Shinki’s hand, or to pat his head, or to pull him into a hug. But Shinki doesn’t like to be touched; will scream and kick in horror at the feeling. Gaara bites the inside of his cheeks, because he wouldn’t ever know where to start. “We can put the leftovers in the refrigerator…” he thinks aloud, taking out the plastic wrap and collecting Shinki’s untouched food. “Right here… On the first shelf, you can eat it whenever you would like.”

Shinki doesn’t even look up at Gaara, because he doesn’t care. He just wants to go home.

* * *

By the time the sun touches the idea of settling in for the evening, Gaara is going in circles in the living room trying to think of what he can do that _isn’t_ reading one thing or the other. Shinki has since gone to his bedroom to play, or to draw, or maybe both?

 _Is it bad that I don’t know what Shinki is up to?_ Gaara wonders this as he is rearranging the pillows on the loveseat against the south wall for the fourth time this evening. Since trying to convince Shinki to eat something other than Cheez-Its was a complete flop, Gaara let Shinki run off to his bedroom. Playtime with Shinki tends to involve lots of crashing down of colorful-block towers, and other assorted rambunctious behavior, but he’s been fairly quiet for the past ten minutes or so. It makes Gaara feel bad to not give the child any attention all evening, but this is meant to be the time they take it easy and Shinki gets comfortable at home; and for Shinki, being comfortable is being alone.

“He’s always been quite like that… To himself, and all…” Shinki’s late mother assured him some months ago when the boy cowered away from Gaara’s first greeting. Not that Gaara would blame him — he knows how unseemly his patchy cherry-dyed and pillow-headed hair looks with his permanently glower air. Had he been removed from his home as a child (should the Gods have been so kind) and shuffled along to a reclusive, watered down man living alone in an apartment that doesn’t even have a _television_ , he would want to be alone, too. It’s not a hard thing to understand, but it’s a hard thing to maneuver.

Shinki is a sweet boy. Gaara knows this, because when they had to go out for errands for the first time together only yesterday, Shinki threw up his hands and ran ahead of them to pick up a garden snail and place it safely into the lawn. Despite being ill-practiced in the art of familial relationships, Gaara has undeniably felt this shift uplifting in his carriage since Shinki came into his life.

Still, Gaara is begging the sun and the sky and the birds in the sky for some signs, here. He remembers, suddenly, under the dirty laundry and the dust that stuffs the holes in his memory, that Shinki once shoveled a high-piled plate of pinto beans into his mouth during Gaara’s initial visit with his mother. And beans — beans are easy. Gaara can do beans.

So he does. And Gaara feels his heart stretching out across his chest and bursting at the seams, somehow. Currently, there’s a little boy down the quiet hall on a quiet play mat in a quiet bedroom; and Gaara is going to bring him happy beans and make him _smile_.

This is what Gaara pictures: a handful of similar scenarios involving Shinki being surprised with a food he actually likes, and his eyes light up, and he _eats_. They sit on his colorful play mat, and maybe Shinki will be relaxed, and Gaara can rub his back when Shinki tells him he’s full, if he lets him. Gaara will clean up the dishes, and Shinki will play in the living room until he is falling asleep and needing to be carried back to bed.

This is what Gaara pictures.

But when he pushes the door open, Shinki’s bedroom is empty and the window is wide open and Gaara doesn’t know where he’s gone.

Gaara finds himself too afraid to move, in case this is real. Still he stands as to help the spell pass — his channel is stuck in surf, a routine moment of separation. It would make sense, he believes, for the room to spin after a minute; and suddenly everything will be different, and Shinki will be on the floor playing with his red and blue and yellow blocks on the low rise rug, looking up at Gaara with a big frown on his face.

But nothing changes. The sun is setting, and Shinki is gone.

It’s the sound of a plastic bowl clattering to the floor that starts Gaara back up again. His head is spinning. There are beans spilled across the rug, but Gaara steps over it.

Bad. This is bad. A bad thing is happening, and Gaara _can’t_ push it away. How sorely he wants to fall to his knees and collapse his head onto Shinki’s rocking chair and let himself doze until he can desquamate the problem away.  But forward his feet take him, sliding across the hardwood floor to the open window.

It’s cold outside, and Gaara only notices _how_ bitingly cold once he’s got his entire torso leaning out of the window, sweeping the street for signs of Shinki.

But what _is_ the sign of a Shinki leaving his tracks? They’ve yet to even share an entire conversation, much less have an outing together. Gaara expects to see perhaps a trail of destruction; a row of flower pots toppled over and pieced apart, or the neighborhood dogs cut off of their leashes, running rampant to the east and howling after their new king. Much to his disappointment, there’s nothing like this going on.

What is the sign of a Shinki leaving his tracks? The puttering of leaves scrambling to make it across 40th Avenue scream: You’ll never find me.

Gaara knows Shinki wasn’t taken — he’d compulsively checked the locks throughout the insipid afternoon, and Shinki has been fixated on escaping since Gaara invited him inside. Obviously missing items (Shinki’s beloved Buzz Lightyear sippy cup of a constant pineapple juice, his stuffed elephant with the tail torn off, his pink and blue Sailor Moon backpack) only serve to confirm his suspicions: Shinki’s packed his bag and is heading somewhere else, and he’s not coming back for dinner.

 _Okay_ , Gaara tells himself. _Okay_. He can do this; he’d run away on innumerable occasions himself during his own blue-tinted adolescence and managed to end up safer than he’d ever been before. When he was a child, Gaara would run away to the beach, because the sky never ended and the sand didn’t make his knuckles split open.

But Gaara isn’t Shinki, and that’s what makes finding him easy.

* * *

You don’t need to check the weather channel to know when it’s going to rain in Soggy Seattle during December. The threat is always prevalent, so when it does indeed begin to rain just minutes after Gaara has left the apartment, he’s well prepared with a coat and an umbrella. Along with him he’s brought Shinki’s own little heavy coat and a snack that he knows he will eat, even if it’s not the healthy dinner Gaara was aiming for — Cheez-Its.

Gaara has been walking east since he left and isn’t planning on going too far. In his front pants pocket is a sticky note with an address scribbled across it, taken from the boy’s legal file. It is extraordinary to really see how close together they had lived all of this time without knowing of the other existing. Their dreamspaces had only always been less than a mile apart.

If he’s being honest, Gaara’s not feeling much of anything. _Regardless_ of anything, he’s living the curse of being anchored to a body kept occupied by nothing benevolent — only is it sinister, and only does he live in wicked fright. His father’s ill testimony forfeited Gaara, his feeble and sickly youngest, to the man underground before Gaara knew of crossing his Ts and dotting his Is. He was raised to fall and fail — everyone has always known he can’t do this.

But the thing is, he can, and he will; so he is. Gaara’s had his time of disarray and indignation and repentance and attainment. Even when he’s not, he’s capable. So, yes, he can do this.

(He doesn’t notice when this becomes less about finding Shinki, and more about being his father, but that comes around another time.)

Pulling out his smartphone, Gaara double checks to be sure that he’s coming up to his destination. If he did everything correctly (and you would be surprised how often these things _don’t_ go correctly), it should be on this next street.

And when he turns the corner, he sees Shinki.

Truthfully, he sees his Sailor Moon backpack before anything else; it’s bright pinks and blues and even has a reflective tab stitched in on the topside.

And Gaara takes in the setting. He had never seen Shinki’s home, but he recognizes the address painted on beside the first-level window. There is an old, rotted three-step stairway leading up to the front porch, which is decorated with dirty wash, a bicycle, a trash bag, and what looks to Gaara like a broken-down miniature refrigerator.  

With Shinki there, standing in the middle of it all, and the mountains out and the asphalt rainbowed, it’s almost beautiful.

But because life is a circus, it’s not like Shinki is just hanging out in front of his old house, fiddling with a Rubik’s cube and sipping on his pineapple juice. Shortly after Gaara spots the child, Shinki is hollering quite loudly and stomping his feet on the porch and waving his hands in the face of an older man, who is looking tired and bothered in his sleepwear, standing between the boy and the front door. Behind the man and in the doorway is a woman, who is appearing to feel equally as irritated by their surprise visitor.

Gaara sighs, tossing words around in his brain and trying to figure out how to apologize to these people. Good evening, sorry this child, who was explicitly under my supervision and care, escaped from our second-story apartment a mile away and came here just to wreak havoc on your lawn; can I get you a coffee? On top of this, he must manage to convince Shinki that going home with Gaara is totally the better idea, here. The anticipation of such a confrontation, however, doesn’t stop Gaara from nearly skipping across the street to Shinki with, dare he say, excitement.

Then suddenly, and with appreciable force, the man — perhaps in his senior years, but a barrel heavier than Gaara regardless — pushes Shinki backwards and off of the steps. He tumbles back, plopping down with the cushion of the backpack hanging from his shoulders breaking his fall some, luckily enough.

Nevertheless, Shinki sits up on his elbows and begins to howl in pain and in fear. Gaara is so shocked, he drops Shinki’s coat and his umbrella to run to Shinki’s side.

“Excuse me!” Gaara feels the words come out like a hiccup and ring in his ears like a voice unfamiliar. The man and woman standing outside whip their heads up to look at him, and Gaara quickly comes over to step between Shinki and the man, who is now standing over the child with an imperializing glower.

One look at Shinki, and Gaara can immediately see that he has been wrestling around with someone, or something, at least. His t-shirt’s been mangled, and even his buzzed hair looks wild. If not this, the incandescent expression on his face tells it all.

Right now, Gaara should be angry and heroic, but he’s only feeling afraid and left with nowhere to put his hands. There has always been something about standing guard to a man larger than he that’s left his heart feeling too tried.

The outside of the house is painted a pale yellow. Gaara wonders what it means.

“Mama!” Shinki cries, pointing to the front door, _his_ front door, it was _his_. Large globs of tears are rolling down his cheeks, and his voice is tired. For a child who has, for the past week, only ever given Gaara stern looks of disapproval, he has never looked so small.

“He tried letting himself right into our house!” the woman scolds Gaara from the doorway, her arms held up tight across her chest. “Just opened the door and came running right in!”

“I’m sorry —” tries Gaara, as he kneels down to comfort Shinki, but the man cuts him off.

“I pulled that monkey back outside, and he bit the shit out of me!” the homeowner bellows, holding up his left hand to show where Shinki bit him hard enough on his palm to bruise. Shinki’s cries are only louder, and the man barks at him to shut up.

Gaara winces. _They just don’t understand_. _He never got to say goodbye_.

“Please don’t scream at him. He’s only six.” He shapes his words to be brave, but his knees rattle up a thunderstorm. “This was his home.”

It was. This was his scruffy yard, and these are the steps he walked up with his mother after fetching groceries. Gaara has seen photos, shared with him before his mother’s last morning, of Shinki smiling on this very porch.

As much this makes Gaara’s chest ache, it doesn’t seem that any sympathy has reached the new occupants of Shinki’s cradle.

“Boy, if you don’t get that wailing animal off of my yard, I’ll be calling the police. You’re lucky I haven’t already,” the man bites before finally kicking open the door wide open to stomp his away inside.

Shinki chokes on his despairful sobs, and Gaara reaches over to console him, but stops. The woman, tucking her hands under her armpits and dressing herself in a daze, takes a moment to look at the two before shambling inside after the man and closing the door behind her. Everything is quiet, save for Shinki’s stifled cries and whispered wishes for his mother to just come outside.

And Gaara stands there, knowing there is nothing he can do. A handful of people had stopped to watch the spectacle, but are now pushing their baby strollers and leading their leashed-puppies and wearing the soles of their shoes as if they had not seen a man push a child down, as if they had not seen a man scare a child into a corner.

It feels like they are the only ones there, and Gaara knows it must be true. Earth is poisoned and crumbling and roaring, and no one sees it but them. When Gaara looks up at Shinki’s house — its paint chipping, its floors creaking — he feels it: they were the ones left out of mind. Every night, Gaara has lied awake in an irate and incessant sweat, wondering why the stars and the moon and the angels wasted a lifetime on someone like him.

Perhaps the stars and the moon and the angels knew there would someday be a little boy who needed someone who really understood how it is to be like him — misconstrued and mismaligned. As awkward and unfamiliar it feels for now, whatever this is is for them.

They will take it step by step; leaving their weighted hearts at the bottom of the mountain.

In, and then out.

“It’s okay,” he tells this boy, so young and more agonized. The handkerchief that Gaara keeps in the pocket of his overcoat is convenient for right now, and he hopes it is warm on Shinki’s saturated cheek. Shinki doesn’t move, or look up at Gaara; nor does he bat his hand away, which must show for something. Shinki merely sits his rear on the wet concrete walkway, mewling amid his despair.

“Mama.” Shinki chokes on the word, and he begins to cough. They both know his mother won’t be coming out, but Gaara was on his knees for years until he finally accepted that the dead are dead for life.

Shinki leans his cheek into Gaara’s hand and closes his eyes.

“It’s okay.”

It’s okay.

The sun has set.

* * *

If you pick up a used, twice-restored paperback from Gaara’s favorite bookstore and decide to purchase it for $2.99 after turning it over in your hands, you may learn an abundance of things that grade school never told you about having a foster child; one — on the last page — being that genetics may define similarities, but they don’t define a family.

  
Brokenness affects all those who lack the love of a family, but this is what Gaara and Shinki started planting sunflowers on their balcony for.


End file.
